EAST LANSING, Mich. – To paraphrase the Rolling Stones: We can’t always get everything we want in life, but we get what we need. Michigan State University researchers believe this is a powerful principle in evolution as well. Trade-offs, which are evolutionary compromises, drive the diversity of life, said Chris Adami, MSU professor of microbiology and molecular genetics. (more…)
A Yale-led research team has developed a new approach to species conservation that prioritizes genetic and geographic rarity and applies it to all 9,993 known bird species.
“To date, conservation has emphasized the number of species, treating all species as equal,” said Walter Jetz, the Yale evolutionary biologist who is lead author of a paper published April 10 in Current Biology. “But not all species are equal in their genetic or geographic rarity. We provide a framework for how such species information could be used for prioritizing conservation.” (more…)
Protecting key regions that comprise just 17 percent of Earth’s land may help preserve more than two-thirds of its plant species, according to a new study by an international team of scientists, including a biologist from North Carolina State University.
The researchers from Duke University, NC State and Microsoft Research used computer algorithms to identify the smallest set of regions worldwide that could contain the largest numbers of plant species. They published their findings in the journal Science. (more…)
Three populations of aye-ayes on Madagascar studied
For the first time, the complete genomes of three populations of aye-ayes–a type of lemur–have been sequenced and analyzed.
The results of the genome-sequence analyses are published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). (more…)
UCLA infectious diseases doctor played key role in finance strategy for therapy
A new international program, conceived in part by a UCLA physician, has rapidly transformed access to lifesaving anti-malarial drugs by providing cheap, subsidized artemisinin-based combination therapies in seven African countries that account for a quarter of the world’s malaria cases.
The first independent evaluation of the Affordable Medicines Facility–malaria (AMFm) program was recently published in the journal The Lancet. The program is based at the Global Fund in Geneva, an international financing institution dedicated to disbursing funds to prevent and treat infectious diseases. The evaluation shows that the program improved access to key artemisinin combination therapies, or ACTs, which offer broader protection and less antibiotic resistance than anti-malaria medications currently available in those African nations. (more…)
Who Will Dig It?
Kids under 13, kids over 13 who grew up with the “Madagascar” franchise, and frazzled parents who can drop off the kids at the theater on a hot summer afternoon. (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. – By 2100, global climate change will modify plant communities covering almost half of Earth’s land surface and will drive the conversion of nearly 40 percent of land-based ecosystems from one major ecological community type – such as forest, grassland or tundra – toward another, according to a new NASA and university computer modeling study.
Researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., investigated how Earth’s plant life is likely to react over the next three centuries as Earth’s climate changes in response to rising levels of human-produced greenhouse gases. Study results are published in the journal Climatic Change. (more…)
Changes in ocean chemistry due to increased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are expected to damage shellfish populations around the world, but some nations will feel the impacts much sooner and more intensely than others, according to a study by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
As CO2 levels driven by fossil fuel use have increased in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, so has the amount of CO2 absorbed by the world’s oceans, leading to changes in the chemical make-up of seawater. Known as ocean acidification, this decrease in pH creates a corrosive environment for some marine organisms such as corals, marine plankton, and shellfish that build carbonate shells or skeletons. (more…)
